A better summary of the ruling is that "Companies must follow their own procedures".
You can't fire someone without process. The ruling is that this wasn't "gross misconduct", and proper procedure for dealing with the behaviour should have been followed.
So before someone comes in claiming the UK to be an unruly anarchy, if you go around dissing the boss or your company then you'll still find yourself facing disciplinary action and could be eventually sacked, just not on the spot!
What is of note is that you cannot typically claim unfair dismissal if you've been employed for less than 2-years in the UK. Seems she was employed more than 2-years and passed the qualifying period. Proves if you plan to run a business and hire employees, you got to understand the protections in place.
"Let's not trivialize firing someone because they (verbally) abused someone"? Are you OK with mobbing in the workplace? They may be "just words" but the can actually have a huge mental negative effect on someone, especially if sustained.
I'm not saying this level of seriousness is what happened here, but you exaggerate in the other direction.
As with all forms of verbal abuse, the presence of a power imbalance is paramount. And since we abolished slavery, it is about as high as it gets here.
What an employee says about their boss generally has zero implications on their career and lives, so long as it does not outright accuse them of a crime. When's the last time someone called you to provide a reference on your boss? I thought so.
In turn, what a boss says about their employees can be entirely career-ending and therefore life-altering, even if said in jest or later retracted. A higher standard exists precisely because the stakes are so much higher.
Yes, adopt the language of therapists to add some gravitas. Sorry, but getting called an asshole/dickhead/whatever (especially if it's true) is not abuse in this context. Even less so given the power imbalance between the employee and the employer.
I'd say that making such determinations based on fragmentary information, such as decontextualised headlines, is a better characterisation. Arguments like these (where some people say "it's abuse!" and others say "it's not abuse!", and nobody focuses on how they're not using the same "it") make the lines seem blurred when actually, it's pretty clear-cut most of the time.
Even if you know the lines aren't blurred, if you perceive others acting as though it's up for debate, you're more likely to consider bad-faith appeals to the subjectivity of abuse as perhaps being in good faith. Few among us are philosophers capable of reasoning everything through from first principles, all the time, so these things matter.
Sure, I agree with all that, well-said. “Dickhead, asshole, douchebag, fuckstain” are terms of endearment in some of my social circles. Context matters.
Tone and body language are like 80%+ of in-person, verbal communication.
We need to be very careful to, as I mentioned, not “abuse” the term abuse to the point where it becomes meaningless. If everything is abuse, nothing is abuse, and we need to invent a new term.
Someone calling names is pretty trivial though, literally the behavior of schoolyard children, and it certainly should take more than that to rattle an adult.
Calling others names shows a total lack of self-control and disrespect towards others. It's toxic in personal relationships too. If my boss called me names I would rm -rf my hard drive and walk out immediately. I have too much self respect to deal with that.
You'll see plenty of it here on HN - some commenters are great at just staying within the guidelines while pushing others over the edge in frustration.
Not from what I've seen - that small incentive is usually outweighed by the immense burden of retraining and finding a good candidate.
It's similar to probationary periods - you'll see a few people fired right at the three month mark but it's usually more of a case of giving that employee grace for the probationary period rather than accelerating a firing that'd happen later.
I believe the accrual is in practice gradual. E.g. 103 weeks in, the tribunal would basically give you the same rights as full 2 years in. 1.5 year in, they will give you some of them, etc.
No, several of these are hard cut-offs. So, 103 weeks isn't two years, you can't be unfairly dismissed under the terms of this law. In this case I believe the relevant paragraph of legislation is:
"Section 94 does not apply to the dismissal of an employee unless he has been continuously employed for a period of not less than two years ending with the effective date of termination"
Section 94 is the name of a section of the current law regarding the general idea of like, employing people, and that section says you can't unfairly dismiss them, so this sub-sub clause says that only applies after two years.
Edited to add: This stuff is easier to find in the UK because although it's legalese, the Westminster Parliament is obliged by its own rules to name laws after what they do, this is an employment law so I searched for "Employment". In the US it might be called the NICEHAT Act or Jim Smith's Law or some other useless nonsense because they have no such rule.
This is the letter of the law. But I have been advised in the past that in practice, if reviewing a case, the tribunal is likely to see the accrual as gradual. So if you fire someone a week before their two years are up, they may well decide it was unfair.
At the very bottom yeah. There's some level of abuse of employment rules and such for low paid work, particularly at larger outfits. Sometimes it's outright criminal and these people are least able to advocate for their own rights.
Persuading the tax man that the cleaners who in effect are your direct employees are "freelance" somehow and so you shouldn't have to pay the tax. Or claiming that the labourers you hired don't get paid from 0830 because they aren't "really" working until 0900 even though they're in a company minibus being driven to the worksite and this is the only way they could get there.
Neither of those things is legal here but both of them might happen and will only sometimes get reported and those responsible will get at worst a fine. If you tried anything like this shit with Sam who has a penthouse office in the City he'll summon a swarm of employment lawyers and ruin your life, but because Mateusz who cleans the toilets has dubious immigration status and he's behind on his rent he's probably not going to make a fuss when you steal from him this way. This sucks.
The problems are always at the very bottom. People who are closest to the poverty line, most easily replaceable, least easily able to organize and demand better and also most separated from those who have more freedom to demand change. One important angle unions think about is schemes to separate these low wages workers from colleagues who would be able to advocate for improvements. If the guy cleaning the toilets doesn't legally work for the same company as the guy who uses them, suddenly the question of whether "cleaning toilets" pays a living wage isn't a matter of employee solidarity...
Edited: Swapped Manhattan for the City (of London) because the topic is specifically UK employment
You still can if you can show you were unfairly discriminated against, for example in racial, ethnic, religious or gender basis. In case of pregnant women, this is so strong that in fact the employer may need to prove they are not discriminating.
It all hangs on "reasonableness" for which there is no legal definition. Generally if there is no lasting harm (like setting fire to the office) then there is a process like a three strikes rule in which the employee is given a chance to mend their ways (like not swearing).
Anyway, main point is that points 129 and 130 basically say 'you can't dismiss someone for calling their boss a dickhead', and then 134-136 say 'and even your own guidelines say so'.
Context matters, what profession you’re in matters, what the power imbalance is matters. Who the person is and what they are like matters and the situation does too.
A workplace where no one swears, ever, sounds shit.
I started my career in the UK around 2010 and it could have been normal banter at that point but I feel workplace relationships have generally become more corporate and risk-averse since then and it wouldn't be acceptable in most office environments anymore. I suppose everyone will have a different experience.
Everyone certainly does have a different perspective.
Personally, I've never worked anywhere in Blighty where giving and accepting piss taking and creative insults isn't the norm. Anybody offended by this will be politely told to develop a sense of humour (of the type spelt with a 'u').
Depends on where you want to draw the line.. I definitely prefer teams where you don't have to play oral minesweeper all day. It just results in everyone being obviously two faced.. If I do something very stupid, it's fine to snap and call me a dickhead, as long as we keep getting along the other 99% of the time. It's even fine to do it lovingly when I'm doing minor stupid activities. Of course there are limits but for me it's very far from 'do it once and I'm running to HR'
Maybe I'm just extremely lucky with my coworkers, but I've been working for 25+ years, and it's never occurred to me to call a co-worker a dickhead. It really should not be that hard to keep it professional and avoid insulting people.
"Not calling someone a dickhead" should not take constant cognitive load or feel like "playing minesweeper" all day.
Of course it depends on the context, but firing someone over one offense of calling someone a dickhead is quite reactionary and punitive. Grow up. Sometimes people say things they regret in the moment, it doesn't mean someone and potentially their family should be affected. This is why you have policies, writeups and whatnot. Not jumping at the chance to fire someone.
Might just be 'cause I'm Serbian (we swear a lot, and the swearing tends to be very vulgar) and also grew up surrounded by Aussies, Kiwis, Brits and Irishmen, but to me "dickhead" barely registers as an insult or even all that unprofessional. I obviously wouldn't go around calling just about anyone a dickhead unprovoked, but I've been a part of plenty of teams where we talk to each other along those lines. Hell, I've had my fair share of "Cunt"s thrown around too. Obviously there's a cultural element at play here though, so what might be okay for me won't be for someone else.
That said I really don't think something like this warrants dismissal, unless it's a frequent problem. Obviously we shouldn't be going around and insulting each other for no reason, but are bosses really so fragile that they can't deal with a single instance of their subordinates being sorta mean to them and calling them names?
I worked at a public company in the Netherlands (TomTom) that employs many people from different countries and cultures, and many LGBTQ+ people as well.
In all earnestness, without any malice, my American friend (who I'd worked with before and at TomTom) asked a group of co-workers if anybody wanted to be his guinea pig for some new software, and boy that didn't over well with the Italian guy! He profusely apologized and explained what he really meant by the term "my guinea pig", and things were just fine, plus he learned not to call Italians "guinea pigs" (with either the hard or soft "g").
That same friend eventually left the company for a much better offer, but later TomTom rehired him with a huge promotion and pay raise because they really loved his work and desperately needed him, and he was irreplaceable. He was rehired and promoted to CTO, and finally he was having dinner with a bunch of the TomTom founders and executives, including the CMO Corinne Vigreux and her husband the CEO Harold Goddijn.
Then Corinne Vigreux said something blatantly transphobic, which she obviously meant as a slur (unlike his "guinea pig" faux pas that he immediately apologized for), so he called her on it, and she would not take it back or apologize, and that incident led to him suddenly leaving the company.
That was after TomTom spent huge amounts of money to initially recruit, then later rehire and retain him, he designed and implemented key parts of their infrastructure, and they even prominently featured him in many of their recruiting videos and magazine articles and LinkedIn posts, saying how much he liked working there -- many of them are still online at TomTom's recruiting web site!
But thanks to the inherent power imbalance, her executive level privilege, and the nepotistic advantage of being married to the CEO, she got away with it scott free, and they hushed up the reason he left).
He lost his dream job, and everyone else was left wondering why he suddenly disappeared for no apparent reason, after being so pleasant to work with, performing so well, and being so frequently exploited as a recruiting spokesperson, and interviewed as a representative of the company. (I am not exaggerating that if you google tomtom + his name you get pages of unique interviews and articles over many years.)
Corinne Vigreux drove him out of his job for speaking out against her intentional slur, when she clearly said and meant it in front of several other people, when she's the one who should have been reported to HR and punished for what she said, not him.
Over many years, TomTom spent a LOT of money recruiting, relocating, then re-recruiting him, they loved his work. I originally recruited him by introducing and recommending him to executives, managers, and HR. I still have the enthusiastic emails I sent with and about him, which they acted on by giving him an offer he couldn't refuse and relocating him. I never got any recruiting bonus, since I was a contractor at the time I recruited him. I just wanted the opportunity to work with him again, and cherished the opportunity to get the old band back together in Amsterdam.
The manager I recommended him to, who hired him and worked closely with him, was shocked and dismayed to hear about the actual reason he suddenly left. Especially because the company culture as a whole is definitely not transphobic, and I know current employees with trans children who were also quite shocked to hear about Corinne Vigreux's bigotry. TomTom certainly gives a lot of lip service to inclusivity on their web site.
Introducing the LGBTQIA+ Committee: How TomTom is empowering inclusive action:
But after the derogatory transphobic bullshit Corinne Vigreux said in front of witnesses, which was clearly in violation of company policy, culture, scientific facts, and just plain human decency, I believe she morally owes TomTom a refund of all the money they spent recruiting and relocating and hiring him twice, as well as all the money they had to spend replacing him.
Because she can CERTAINLY afford it. She might even learn to keep her bigoted mouth shut and transphobic opinions to herself, or grow some thicker skin if she can't bring herself to be do that, merely being polite and respectful to her own employees, instead of being bigoted and vengeful. And not to be so blatant about taking advantage of her nepotism and exploiting the power imbalance and her husband.
Not just because of all of TomTom's money and reputation she burnt at the altar of her ugly bigoted vanity, but because of how difficult her bigotry and nepotism make it for TomTom to recruit and retain good people: a problem she recognizes and publicly talks about herself. The transphobia's one thing, but losing high level talented employees because they stand up to transphobia or any kind of bigotry is much more systemically worse, and should be actionable by HR.
>In fact, she thinks, the lack of talented staff is “the biggest issue most organisations are facing. You have to fish in a bigger pond to fill those gaps. So of course you should look at women too”.
Apparently not trans women, nor people who stand up to her transphobic bigotry either.
TomTom certainly hasn't been doing well under HER leadership (just google the ill-fated sports watches and "TomTom Bandit" that you've probably never heard of -- maybe the product name was too honest about the cost of its subscription service).
But being married to the CEO has its nepotistic advantages, like being able to say whatever she wants in front of everyone, and then get rid of anyone who has the guts to stand up to her and call her out on her bigotry.
People grow and learn and one of your primary jobs as a manager is to help them do so. We're all human and mess up - one dickhead seems like a cause for a warning. Multiple dickheads suggest someone isn't learning, and _that_ is a good reason to fire them.
> Calling someone a dickhead in any professional environment is unprofessional
The fuck it is. There is a while bunch of preconditions that need to be met first. (for example, if you're working as a teacher, its probably unproffesh, but as an engineer[a real one, not a software engineer], you need to call a spade a spade.)
You can't have "professionalism" as a mask to allow abuse or general degrading treatment at work.
crucially the person in question used dickheads non-pejoratively, it wasn't an insult. However the employer didn't follow procedure either.
> Should bosses also get one free insult for their employees too? Obviously not.
If their employment contract requires it, sure. This worker's contract guaranteed them a warning in this scenario. They are protected by that legally binding contract. That's the entire point of it.
Even outside a contract, consequences for actions should be proportional to the harm of those actions. "You called me a mild insult in the heat of the moment after years of productive employment, so I'm removing your livelihood" is not.
> No, it's not just that—even if the company's policies said so, they still might have been found to have unlawfully dismissed her...
The sections you quoted don't support this statement. The quoted statements highlight contractual clauses which include "excessive" foul language which one instance of calling someone a dickhead does not approach. The only point a single instance of swearing could be grounds for dismissal were against a customer, which is specifically highlighted in the contract.
Were the contract to include a clause of "you will not swear at other employees," then that would have been sufficient. Now, whether that falls foul of the Equality Act (due to discriminatory treatment) is a different question. You can't extrapolate any result of that from this case, however.
> Further, whilst not determinative in itself of whether or not the dismissal was
unfair, this one off comment did not amount to gross misconduct or misconduct
so serious to justify summary dismissal for reasons that I have provided above.
That part of the ruling is independent of the company policies.
Yes, poor performance could be one. Breach of contract is another, for example, doing something counter to your job. This is different from gross misconduct, as gross misconduct doesn't have to be enumerated in your contract. For example, punching your colleague is both illegal and will likely get you fired for gross misconduct. My contract doesn't have a clause that says "don't assault your colleagues."
> The ruling holds that business process is not only legally binding, but trump's the terms for dismissal in the employment contract.
No, it doesn't. The business process was part of the legally binding contract.
> The hearing was told that under the terms of her contract, she could be fired for “the provocative use of insulting or abusive language”. However, this required she be given a prior warning. Only more serious breaches such as “threatening and intimidating language” would be gross misconduct and warrant summary dismissal.
My reading of the article was that the former was stated in the contract, and the latter was the judicial finding. In retrospect,I suppose this is unclear from the article.
> Section 15 and 16 of the contract deal with disciplinary rules and unsatisfactory
work and misconduct. Sections 18, 19 and 20 specify the respondent’s
disciplinary procedures. Section 21 details the appeals procedure. The
grievance procedure and grievance appeal procedure are laid out at section 22.
> At section 16 there is a list of the type of conduct or unsatisfactory work that
may lead to dismissal after a prior warning has been given. There is a non
exhaustive list of examples which include negligence, carelessness or general
lack of capability in performance of the employees duties, bad timekeeping and
the provocative use of insulting or abusive language.
Because process is what ensures that people subject to the same contract terms all receive equal and fair treatment.
You fire one person for calling their boss a dickhead, you’d better be sure you never allowed someone on the same contract to call their boss a dickhead without being fired.
A quick update to the procedures that calling someone a dickhead is a fireable offense is all that is needed.
You might even be able to have something generic like "verbal abuse" but then you have to be careful that it might be turned on the bosses and cause another type of lawsuit.
HR and legal across the UK are probably updating their company procedures right now to include every imaginable reason they might want to fire someone.
That’s why I don’t see these rulings as a win for the common employee. The situation now encourages companies to be as broad as possible with their contracts and policies and include so many just-in-case provisions that it starts to get hard for anyone to know and follow all of them.
> HR and legal across the UK are probably updating their company procedures right now to include every imaginable reason they might want to fire someone.
No, they aren't because that's not how contracts or the law work in the UK. The court found that the contract enumerated a long list of breaches of contract, of which "swearing at colleagues" was not in that list. This means the court read the list as exhaustive, because it appeared to be exhaustive.
If the contract was worded differently, the court may not have used this interpretive rule. If the wording was a little more broad, the court may have worked to determine whether "swearing at your boss" could reasonably fit into the terms.
No, the ruling expressly refers to the list as non exhaustive, but given the other related references to misconduct (including the use of inappropriate language) it was not reasonable to infer that this example was gross misconduct.
> No, they aren't because that's not how contracts or the law work in the UK. The court found that the contract enumerated a long list of breaches of contract, of which "swearing at colleagues" was not in that list. This means the court read the list as exhaustive, because it appeared to be exhaustive.
Yes, and that's why I said HR and Legal are updating their boilerplate to be more exhaustive.
UK companies are not going to be able to out engineer UK labor protections to arrive at the US' at will experience. Such is the point of labor laws and protections. They can update the procedures, they'll still end up in court or tribunals. This is not the US (thankfully).
I'm saying they're going to update the contracts to match the labor laws.
If the labor laws say you have to have fireable offenses explicitly enumerated, contracts will now have a lot of fireable offenses explicitly enumerated. That's not evading the law, that's literally how you comply with the law.
> I'm saying they're going to update the contracts to match the labor laws.
No they're not. This ruling makes no difference to the legal, employment or contractual landscape of the UK. Reading the ruling, it was resolved in exactly the way any competent HR lawyer would expect. The employer was bang out of order and was rightly slapped down by the court.
> If the labor laws say you have to have fireable offenses explicitly enumerated
No they don't. As others have pointed out: the ruling flags that the contract itself enumerates gross misconduct offences. Some of which include "excessive swearing" or "swearing at customers." Given the context of what the contract does enumerate, the court found that the contract does not consider this, obviously, lesser misconduct was out of scope of gross misconduct, as per the terms of the contract.
If the contract did not include such a specific list, but merely described a more broad category of things that are considered gross misconduct, then the court might have ruled differently.
Based on conversations with a relative in HR in the UK, usually the company procedures are detailed and cover everything. You just have to follow the procedure. Most of the pain they ever had to deal with has come down to managers etc. acting off the cuff, not following the documented process.
> HR and legal across the UK are probably updating their company procedures right now to include every imaginable reason they might want to fire someone.
If you want to fire someone you follow procedure. In this case they didn't follow procedure. This is exactly the sort of situation HR already despairs over.
Writing new HR documents can't fix this, the same way that bolding the text "Do not press this button" in the instruction manual will not stop customers who don't read the manual and then press the button from doing so.
This also just obviously isn't gross misconduct. So now your rewritten procedures might get you sued which (checks notes) is the opposite of what you wanted.
They'd best be prepared to enforce it evenly, then, or the next suit is "my boss called me a dickhead 43 times without any consequences, and that's discriminatory".
Which is another loss for the common employee, because now if you mistakenly violate one of those voluminous company policies or you're having a bad day and make a small lapse of judgment, they're going to feel obligated to punish you for it to avoid more legal infractions.
Or, as said rules also apply to the boss, they might feel obligated to be a bit more reasonable.
In this case, all they had to do was issue a warning - as they promosed to do in the contract - instead of a summary firing for the first offense. If the behavior reoccurred they'd have been clear.
have you read any of your company's policys recently?
at one company I could be technically fired for wearing a tracksuit to work.
at a FAANG, one that was very famous for upholding "freedom of expression", could fire me for questioning _in private_ the direction of anyone more senior than me.
Even if those policies are broad and all encompassing, you still need to demonstrate that they were applied correctly, proportionally and reasonably.
You also need to prove that the _policy_ is reasonable as well.
for example you _could_ have a policy where you cannot say anything negative. Good luck trying to prove that its legally reasonable (and that it was applied evenly)
> You might even be able to have something generic like "verbal abuse"
That's just going to lead to a lawsuit on the definition of "verbal abuse".
> A quick update to the procedures that calling someone a dickhead is a fireable offense is all that is needed.
Even specifically stating that might not work. It is not uncommon for such clauses to be struck through in court if they are deemed unfair and disproportionally punitive to the employee.
For a regular office drone otherwise in good standing, given the UK's cultural context, getting fired for calling your boss a "dickhead" is an extremely harsh punishment. An official warning, improvement plan, or some kind of training would be more appropriate.
> However, this required she be given a prior warning. Only more serious breaches such as “threatening and intimidating language” would be gross misconduct and warrant summary dismissal.
It seems like the prior warning is the necessary part. The company obviously wants to write the rules such that the upper management team can make a one-off stupid comment to an employee without the employee suing to get them fired. Unfortunately, this means the upper management team can't rage-fire someone with no thought. (No doubt to show how in charge and powerful they are, which kind of proves the person using the term "dickhead" right.)
> A quick update to the procedures that calling someone a dickhead is a fireable offense is all that is needed.
Nope, needs to be reasonable. If you're doing something unusual, then it needs to be telegraphed and backed up so that if you are taken to court you can give evidence as to why that clause was needed.
> have something generic like "verbal abuse"
you would need to have a policy that defines what verbal abuse is, and a way to record and catagorise it. its also a hard task to prove that one instance of verbal abuse where using "dickhead" as a term of endearment without any other connotations (sexual or otherwise) is gross misconduct, especially as the reply was "you can fuck off"
Is calling a colleague dickhead really “verbal abuse”, though?
I think trying to fire someone based on that rather than addressing whatever conflict or friction lead to the “name calling” is an example of bad management.
No, dickhead is a noun; nounal abuse is tolerated.
Telling someone to fuck off could be verbal abuse, as fuck is a verb. But in this case it was not the purely figurative suggestion to fuck off was the britishism meaning to please leave with haste.
The United States is far from an anarchy. There are a huge number of regulations governing employer-employee relationships.
The topic is flexibility in hiring/ firing decisions and whether this flexibility is a good or bad thing overall. The empirical data between US and Europe - where the US has much higher wages and generally lower unemployment - suggests but does not prove this flexibility contributes to a better overall job market. In the US employers may be quicker to fire you, but they are also quicker to hire you.
Personally, as an employee I like the flexibility. If I do a good job, it’s rare to get fired, and I have more ability to jump ship if don’t like my current job.
> and I have more ability to jump ship if don’t like my current job.
This is a complete non-issue in presumably the entire EU (I can only speak for the Netherlands personally, but it's a safe bet except for perhaps Germany)? You can't get fired for literally no reason like in the US, but you can terminate your contract at any time you want with usually 1 month notice. I've literally never encountered any job where it was more than 1 month's notice unless they were very, very high up the food chain like Principal Engineer or VP level, and at that level it's presumably similarly difficult to leave even in the US.
I've actually just quit my job at the start of this month, and I had 16 paid vacation days leftover, so I'll be working for less than half the month before starting my next role. Sure seems like a lot of ability to jump ship to me.
And getting hired hasn't felt harder or more complicated for me than my experience for US companies. Interview processes are the same, you get hired ASAP with companies understanding there's notice periods before you can start working, For the businesses there's a 1-3 month probationary period where you can be let go (most common is 1 month) for no reason, and it's also not like it's impossible to get rid of truly bad performers either, there's just rules in place to make sure companies don't fuck over their employee's lives on a whim. They have to actually prove someone is a detriment to the team, shock horror, in order to fire them.
The alternative in the US for the majority of people not working in big tech for big tech salaries is that the fear of getting fired at any moment in time constantly looms over your head. You're always 1 power-trip away from getting fired by some egotistical dickhead, on top of already having much poorer worker protections, not to mention the state of US healthcare and the fear people have there.
Me? I have a permanent contract and can live safely in the knowledge that if they want to get rid of me unfairly, it'll cost them big time, and even if that happens I know I don't have to stress about ending up in medical debt for the remainder of my natural life should something unfortunate befall me or my loved ones.
NL is definitely at the lower end of EU countries for notice periods. UK is typically 1 month for more junior roles, 2 for more senior. And in Sweden, 3 months is basically the default.
That's mostly true, but I think there's still a bit of nuance; while there isn't really a defined list of acceptable reasons, there are some reasons that are specifically not allowed, like firing someone for race, gender, etc.
Of course, you could argue that being allowed to fire people for pretty much anything other than discrimination makes it an uphill battle to prove it if you were fired illegally, but I'm not attempting to make a defense of the system, just explain my understanding of it.
In some places being fired after a clash with someone above your level counts almost as a gift. They know so many ways to make your life miserable without being it noticeable from the outside, so that if you don't wear a tough skin and can't manage the fine art of forgetting about work problems when you walk out of the office until the following day, leaving becomes the preferable option.
My bigger problem with stuff like this is the people left behind. Every firing and layoff becomes a commentary on what the company actually values versus what they should value. It’s one of the reasons I prefer to be laid off in round 2. It means they didn’t think you were the worst, but also there’s still severance and they haven’t yet rewarded the most loyal employees with the most pain.
> Germans are being arrested for insulting politicians
Is there any evidence that they were actually arrested? What I found was that there was an investigation but not that there have been any arrests made.
Oh sorry, when I said "no one" I meant no one here. You're right that the NYP headline is not accurate, since it only refers to an arrest of an Australian, not any Germans.
I don't know that there were any arrests, which is why I didn't use the word. Instead I provided the descriptions of what happened to them. Not as bad as arrest, but still pretty frightening that these things could happen as a result of such innocuous comments. It's not like they were calling for violence against the politicians or doxxing their families or something.
I mean, context is everything. Whether "dickhead" is unacceptable really depends on the culture of the workplace communication. If the response to someone calling you a "dickhead" is that you tell them twice to "fuck off", you're going to have a hard time making the argument that your workplace communication is expected to be explitive-free. And, "I only stayed here because of you two dickheads" is hardly toxic -- it's elegantly (by certain metrics) communicating an anguished sense of personal loyalty betrayed.
In another context, where "dickhead" was really out of place in the expected communication culture, and where it was really meant to be toxic rather than used to expressed an anguished sense of betrayed loyalty, "Mrs. Jones, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave the building. The personal effects from your desk can be collected from reception tomorrow" might be more tolerated.
I love how she got compensated for legal fees. This should be noted higher in the article or even in the header, to show people that suing corporations can be safe (in some circumstances and countries).
It depends. This was an employment tribunal, and it will typically decide that both parties should pay their own costs, however the tribunal is entitled to conclude that one of the parties was sufficiently wrong that there shouldn't have been a tribunal, and so they should pay everybody's costs.
This creates an incentive to settle rather than waste the tribunal's time when you're fucked.
The nastiest thing I've seen is Putin, via a surrogate, files a case, court accepts despite the Russian origin, the case is bullshit and they'll lose, but when the court says "This case was a waste of our time, losers pay for everything" the surrogate's lawyers go oh, sorry, that Russian surrogate has vanished, conveniently just after paying our high fees.
I think reform to ensure that either the surrogate must pay for insurance or that the state of Russia is on the hook not an amazing vanishing surrogate is needed. Or we could just penalize the hired guns, bankrupt a few millionaire law partners ?
"Reviewing the Q1 results vis a vis EBITA and thinking we could take the organization in a bit less of a phallocephalic direction than current leadership seems to desire..."
that's way to simplified. illegal means, you break the law and must necessarily be punished. but insults are only prosecuted by request of the insulted, and even if that happens, they are not necessarily grounds to be fired. the person making the insult may be punished in some other way.
it depends on the courts though, and it also depends on the relationship between the two people. the more close they are the less likely the accusation of insult is going to stand. stories about such cases go both ways.
in Canada you can tell even the police to fuck off, but not fuck you, which generaly seems a good place to put the line, so actualy calling someone a dickhead would not be ok, comenting on the situation as bieng dicked or fucked, screwed, etc
the exception would be if there was no seperation and the boss was also a sole descision maker or business owner, but in a large company a "boss" is
just an employee who cant be held directly and completly resonsible for dickery.
Lawyers and judges finding ways to make money for themselves. It is obvious nothing productive will ever come out of a configuration where employee calls their boss a dickhead, and the company wants to get rid of such an employee. The only benefit of such a ruling is governments and companies spending more money on lawyers, judges, rulings and all this legal bullshittery.
Saying anything bacon related in front of the pigs (slang for police) has _always_ been a sure fire way to wind them up and get your collar felt. You're only doing that if you're looking for a scrap.
There's a difference between Free Speech - which is a power relation wrt the legislative branch, and freedom of consequences of your speech - which is a power relation wrt the executive.
But what does that have to do with your comment? "a sure fire way to wind them up and get your collar felt" is more about being hassled by police, not really what power relation you have to the executive branch of the government.
Also it is not really true that "free speech" and "freedom from consequences of your speech" are separate. Protecting free speech literally means protection from consequences, if there are no consequences then there's nothing to protect you from.
It is not hard to understand (which is not to say you have to agree with it). It merely puts a significant weight on the intent and expected outcome of the speech. In the case of screaming "I love bacon" at a Muslim it is obvious that the intent is to make people feel unwelcome and probably intimidated, which is not excusable. In this case it is an understandable, if not ideal, emotional reaction to a heated situation.
Generally, _inciting violence_. I mean, agree with that being punishable or not, you've got to admit that it is in a different _category_ to calling some dickhead a dickhead.
Pointing out highly increased crime rates of certain groups of asylum immigrants is not "spreading racial hatred". The emotional reaction to these crimes is a different matter.
Why are you asserting that's what I was talking about?
In any case, I'm curious why certain folk are very interested in spreading that star, but don't spread other stats like female asylum immigrants from "certain groups" have lower crime rates than, say, white men.
No, there are examples of people saying things that break a law getting arrested.
There seems to be this bizarre belief that it's fine to engage in incitement to violence, harassment or stalking, as long as it's done on social media.
It's not. They would be illegal via phone calls and they're still illegal on X or Facebook.
I don't think that's a UK thing, but rather just a close friends thing, which I experienced across multiple cultures. I recall a particular incident as a kid when my dad forcefully told me "Don't talk to me like that; I'm not your friend" and that stuck with me - you need to adapt your tone to the audience.
The last thing I expected was to get downvoted for just saying "English language can be a landmine if you are not careful, especially as a foreigner! lol".
English language uses words such as pussy that supposedly mean a cat, but at the same time they interpret it as vagina; another word is the name Dick which also is being used to mean phallus!
Meanwhile, I get downvoted for commenting the obvious thing which is, English language is absurdly confusing for me as a foreigner and have no idea what to say without offending every English speaker!
You can't fire someone without process. The ruling is that this wasn't "gross misconduct", and proper procedure for dealing with the behaviour should have been followed.
So before someone comes in claiming the UK to be an unruly anarchy, if you go around dissing the boss or your company then you'll still find yourself facing disciplinary action and could be eventually sacked, just not on the spot!